The Internet: Past, Present and Future - Internet &
WWW History

Jesper Vissing Laursen

"The ARPA theme is that the promise offered by the
computer as a communication medium between people, dwarfs into
relative insignificance the historical beginnings of the computer as
an arithmetic engine"(1)

If one were to suggest one single occurrence which led to the
creation of the Internet, it would be the Soviet Union's launch of
the Sputnik satellite in 1957. This seminal incident in space
exploration caused then American President Dwight David Eisenhower to
appoint MIT President James A. Killian as a presidential assistant
for science, and subsequently sparked the creation of a new
department within the Department of Defense, named the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA).(2)

ARPA was the answer to the rising American Cold War paranoia about
military inferiority, fuelled not least by the Sputnik success. The
agency was designed to perform long term high risk/high payoff
research and development, and in this context placed great emphasis
on the development of the at that time fledgling computer technology.
It was felt by ARPA that too many resources had been allocated by
public and private research in order to procure short-term advances
in computer hardware and software. Instead, the Agency realized that
"machines needed greater capability to interact with each other to
gather relevant information, solve problems, anticipate data
requirements, communicate effectively across distances, present
information visually, and do all this
automatically."(3)

"A Universal Network...:" J.C.R. Licklider's Vision

To expand the use of the computer ARPA founded the Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), and psychologist Joseph Carl
Robnett Licklider was appointed as the first director. This choice
proved to be a fruitful one, as Licklider's overriding interest in
human-computer interaction came in handy for the Department of
Defense and ARPA, who in a 1960 survey had branded this area of
crucial importance to the development of effective military command
and control systems.(4)

But at the same time the appointment of the IPTO's first director
also stressed the fact that many of ARPA's research landmarks would
be beneficial to others beside the Department of Defense. Licklider's
main mission was not to design military tools but rather to further
his personal vision of "Man-Computer Symbiosis," (reflecting his
titling of an 1960 article), or as he expressed it in a 1988
interview: "I just wanted to make clear that I wasn't going to
running battle planning missions or something. I was going to be
dealing with the engineering substratum that [would] make it possible
to do that stuff [command and control]." (5)

The Birth of Time-sharing

One of the many projects initiated by the IPTO was the further
development of the computer process known as time-sharing. Pioneered
by MIT scientists in 1961, it attempted to utililize the increasing
power of the few computers available to the research community by
making it possible for several people to use the same computer
simultaneously. In July 1963 a contract was signed between MIT and
the IPTO to implement what was named CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing
System), and thus resources were allocated to aid the vision held by
Licklider and other of his associates, a vision of interactive
computing benefitting both research and educational systems as well
as the world at large.(6)

In retrospect, the development of the time-sharing process and
philosophy was one of the factors that eventually sparked the
creation of what would later become the Internet. However, the lack
of innovation in the networking process itself caused many of its
developers to name CTSS a failure, mostly because the hardware and
software failed to live up to the expectation of being able to
perform long-distance time-sharing tasks.(7) It was
not possible for the time-sharing user to perform computing tasks on
more than one remote system at a time, and the poor quality of
telephone connections would often cause transmission
errors.(8)

Packet switching

In July J.C.R. Licklider departed from the IPTO, but his
successors continued the process of refining networking and
time-sharing.

In 1966 a new networking project was initiated, and in the
following year its leader, Laurence Roberts, presented a proposal for
connecting all computers in the research community via dial-up
telephone lines. At the same time the project became aware of a
number of reports published in 1962 by Paul Baran of the Rand
Corporation,(9) as well as unrelated but yet almost
identical pioneering networking experiments conducted in the U.K. by
Donald Watts Davies of the National Physical
Laboratory.(10) These concerned the possiblities of
using what Davies termed a packet-switching process in order to
secure the survivability of military command and control systems. The
principle of packet-switching relied on a peer-to-peer computer
network, in which all the computers on a network had equal status and
data-forwarding capabilities. If a user then wanted a set of data
transmitted from one computer to another, regardless of the
intervening distance, the transmitting computer would break up the
data in small packets measuring only a few bytes.

These packets were unique, in the sense that they all contained
information as to their point of origin, their destination on the
network, as well as information which would enable the computer on
the receiving end to reassemble the data set as soon as all packets
had arrived. When the IPTO realized the potential of this invention,
they summoned a number of their existing networking contractors;
RAND, University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Stanford
Research Institute (SRI), University of Utah and University of
California in Los Angeles (UCLA), and by the summer of 1968 a set of
specifications for a packet-switching network was approved by the
IPTO.(11)

Later the same year a number of private companies were made to bid
on the physical task of creating such a network, and in January 1969
the contract was awarded to Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a
Cambridge, Massachusetts company engaged in studies of acoustics,
psychoacoustics, human-machine systems, and information systems.

At the same time work was undertaken to implement a set of
communications settings (termed a protocol) which would enable the
diverse number of computer hardware and operating systems available
over such a network to communicate. Such protocols were essential to
the success of such a project, effectively constituting a lingua
franca among the connected computers.(12)

On September 1, 1969 BBN delivered the first network computer, or
IMP (Interface Message Processor) to UCLA, and shortly thereafter
UCSB, SRI and University of Utah received their IMPs. As related by
networking pioneer and then graduate student at UCLA Vinton Cerf, the
hardware was an immediate success; "when they turned it (the IMP) on,
it just started running."(13)

Although predated by the packet-switching experiments performed by
Donald Watts Davies in 1968, ARPA thus succeeded in creating the
first effective long-distance computer network, and it was
appropriately named the ARPANET.

The Network Falls into Place

Despite the early vision formulated by Licklider, the ARPANET
experiment was to a large extent shaped by its status as a complete
novelty on the computer science scene. Most of the people involved in
the day to day work with implementing hardware and software were
graduate students, and the personal accounts provided by participants
suggested a true spirit of invention, but also of confusion: "No one
had any answers, but the prospects seemed exciting. We found
ourselves imagining all kinds of possibilities -- interactive
graphics, cooperating processes, automatic data base query,
electronic mail -- but no one knew where to
begin."(14) In another context, ARPANET pioneer
Steven Crocker describes this more succinctly: "During the initial
development of the ARPANET, there was simply a limit as to how far
ahead anyone could see and manage. The IMPs were placed in
cooperative ARPA R&D; sites with the hope that these research sites
would figure out how to exploit this new communication
medium."(15)

The most important task for the participants in this fledgling
network was to ensure the stability of the communication protocols, a
task undertaken by the so-called Network Working Group, which
convened only a few months before the arrival of the first IMP.
During the following year the group's participants succeeded in
devising a protocol scheme whose basic philosophy is still applied in
the Internet of 1996.

The idea was to have an underlaying protocol taking care of
establishing and maintaining communication between the computers on
the network, and a set of protocols which performed a number of
tasks, such as remote log-in (Telnet) and file transfers (FTP), on
top of this basic communications protocol, initially termed NCP
(Network Control Protocol). This scheme was succesfully tested within
the first year of the ARPANET's existence, and in October 1971, with
the participation of 15 institutions, the network pioneers assembled
at MIT for "a major protocol flyoff," an experiment which proved an
almost total success (only one of the 15 sites involved failed to
establish a connection).(16)

During the 1970s the ARPANET was constantly evolving in size and
stability, and spawned a number of seminal developments. Among the
most noteworthy was electronic mail, developed by Ray Tomlinson of
BBN in 1972,(17) and the establishment of a
transatlantic connection in 1973 (reaching University College of
London, U.K. and Royal Radar Establishment,
Norway).(18) In addition work was undertaken to
improve the basic communication protocols and scale them according to
the constant growth of the ARPANET, work which culminated in the
introduction of a set of new communications protocols, TCP/IP
(Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) in
1982.(19) At the same time the ARPANET team
experimented with connecting various types of packet-switching
networks, including satellite, radio, and cable-based networks.

The Opening of the Net

The years surrounding 1980 contained several important events, of
which the two perhaps most important stand somehow ironic against
each other; the initial military acceptance and usage of
packet-switching networks taking place late in 1978, and the creation
of Usenet in 1979.(20)

The military use of the ARPANET did not have any direct impact on
the civilian use of the research network as such, but highlights the
fact that the Internet of today was conceived as a military
communications tool. Moreover, the military involvement in the
ARPANET was terminated in 1983 when all military sites were
integrated in the Defense Data Network created in
1982.(21)

Usenet, developed by Duke University and University of North
Carolina students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, turned out to be the
ultimate exponent for the physical anarchy of the ARPANET (no central
command control, all connected computers being completely equal in
their ability to transmit and receive packets). Utilizing the
increasingly popular UNIX operating system developed at AT & T's
Bell Laboratories in 1969,(22) and its derived
communication protocol UUCP (Unix-to-Unix-Copy Protocol), Truscott
and Ellis created a hierarchy of discussion groups which were
distributed between a growing number of academic institutions via
modems and phone lines. This hierarchy soon turned out to accommodate
a wide number of interests, from computer programming to car
maintainence, and enabled the participants to read and post
information and opinions in what became known as Usenet
Newsgroups.(23)

At first Usenet was a reflection of its status as a practically
underground activity involving a number of graduate students, but
soon a link was establish which enabled Usenet to receive content
from the ARPANET mailing lists, a discussion forum whose content was
spread via e-mail. One Usenet pioneer, Steve Bellovin, suggest that
this had the consequence of extending the use of the ARPANET: "The
impact of Usenet on the ARPANET was ... a (strong) catalyst to force
re-examination ... on the strict policies against interconnection.
UUCP mail into the ARPANET became a major force long before it was
legit. And it was obviously known to, and ignored by, many of the
Powers that Were."(24) At the same time Usenet and
UUCP proved to be the network service and communications protocol
which heavily contributed to the international growth of the
internetworking principle. In the years 1982-84 Usenet connections
were established to several European countries and Australia, and in
1987 the NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) was established in
order to enable Usenet to be carried on the TCP/IP networks.
(25)

The late Seventies saw two other important events which
contributed to the eventual opening of the ARPANET into what
essentially became a network of networks, an Internet. In May 1979
representatives from ARPA, The National Science Foundation, and
computer scientists from six universities met to the discuss the
possible creation of a dedicated research data network, and in
1982-83 CSNET was established.(26) From the
beginning it was suggested that this new network should be linked to
the ARPANET in a manner transparent to the users, and thus it was
agreed to use the TCP/IP protocols.(27)

At the same time a number of other U.S. universities created
BITNET, which from the outset connected IBM mainframes at
participating data centres. BITNET proved to have an important
multi-disciplinary effect on the research communities, especially
when its e-mail based LISTSERV discussion forums were gated to other
TCP/IP networks.(28)

NSFNET

The creation of CSNET and BITNET in the early Eighties signalled
that the universities had begun to perceive networking as an
essential tool for the research community, and this prompted the NSF
to establish in 1986 a new trans-continental network based on the
TCP/IP protocols, as well as creating 5 super-computing centres whose
services were available to the research community at
large.(29) The network typology of the NSFNET
ensured that smaller academic institutions could afford to use its
services; a high-speed network connection, referred to as the
"backbone," was established between the 5 super-computing centres and
they in turn made their facilities available to universities in their
region, effectively making the network completely
de-centralized.(30)

As noted by Ed Krol, the "most important aspect of the NSF's
networking effort is that it allowed everyone access to the
network."(31) NSF paid for the establishment of a
connection to its network backbone only if a university honored the
principle of extending its connection to other and often smaller
educational institutions in the region.(32) This
openness also initiated the commercial use of NSFNET, a development
which first resulted in the establishment of e-mail links to
commercial mail carriers (MCI Mail and Compuserve) in 1989, and one
year later in the creation of the first commercial dial-up Internet
access provider, The World (world.ste.com).(33)

A Net for All, and a Web Too

The years 1989-96 was another pivotal period for what was now
effectively known as the Internet, stressing the fact that the
original ARPANET had been superceded by a myriad of fast growing
sub-networks operating in the U.S. and internationally (by October
1990 the number of networks was 2063, in January 1996 the number was
93,671). In 1989 the ARPANET was decommisioned, and in April 1995 the
NSFNET reverted back to a pure research network, leaving a number of
private companies to provide Internet backbone
connectivity.(34) At the same time the number of
hosts as well as the network traffic grew at an enormous rate; in
1990 3 million hosts were counted, in July 1996 the number had risen
to 12,881,000.(35)

This veritable explosion in network use, apart from the fact that
the personal computer became a household item in the same span of
time, can be attributed to the result of a research proposal
submitted to the funding authorities of the European Laboratory for
Particle Physics in Switzerland, CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la
Recherche Nucleaire). The title was "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a
HyperText Project," and the authors were Tim Berners-Lee and Robert
Cailliau.(36)

The World-Wide Web (also known as the WWW or Web) was conceived as
a far more user-friendly and navigationally effective user interface
than the previous UNIX-based text interfaces. The communications
protocol devised for the WWW was termed HTTP (HyperText Transfer
Protocol), hypertext being a concept conceived by Theodor Holm
Nielsen in 1960.(37) In this context hypertext is
essentially a navigational tool, linking data objects, be it text or
graphics, together by association in what is effectively a web of
pages, hence the use of the term "World-Wide Web." Berners-Lee and
Cailliau describe the process as follows: "A hypertext page has
pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are
highlighted and can be selected with a mouse....When you select a
reference, the browser [the software used to access the WWW] presents
you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser
follow a hypertext link."(38)

The WWW prototype, developed on the NeXT operating system, was
first demonstrated in December 1990, and on May 17, 1991 the WWW was
let loose by granting HTTP access to a number of central CERN
computers.(39) As soon as browser software became
available for the more common operating systems such as Microsoft
Windows and Apple Macintosh, this new tool was immediately picked up
by the Internet community, and by 1993 an annual growth rate of
341,634 % was noted.(40)

The World-Wide Web, the profiligation of Internet access for
private individuals, as well as the increasing user-friendliness of
the software necessary to master the Internet protocols contributed
to the meteoric rise of network use in the 1990s.

The Future of Internetworking

Browsing through the orginal WWW proposal reveals an irony very
characteristic to the development of the Internet, in the face of
it's author's assertion that "the project will not aim to do research
into fancy multimedia facilities such as sound and
video."(41) In 1996 the present and future of the
Internet, and the WWW in particular, points to a convergence of media
types, and multimedia has indeed become the catch phrase of the day.
Despite serious limitations in contemporary network capacity as far
as full-motion sound and video are concerned, new technologies are
revealed almost on a monthly basis, enabling increasingly interactive
network experiences. This development is supplemented by a constant
innovation in hardware; today's Internet backbones transmit data
packets at a speed up to 200 megabits per second (by comparison, the
NSFNET backbone of 1986 ran at the blazing speed of 56 kilobits per
second). Today the modems of most Internet users run at a speed of
28.8 kbit/s and a digital connection (ISDN) can deliver at a speed of
up to 128 kbit/s, but the possibility of using the fiber optic cables
bringing cable TV to millions of homes in the Western Hemisphere for
Internet data transmission opens up for private connections running
at a speed of up to 10 Mbit/s.(42) Another new
technology, ASDL, promises to use the existing telephone copper wires
for even higher transmission speeds.(43)

But what will these network technologies deliver to the Internet
user? In 1996 commercial Internet hosts have by far overtaken
educational and governmental (in July 1996 there were 29 %
conmmercial domains, as opposed to 9 %
educational),(44) and these commercial interests
clearly perceive the Internet, and the WWW in particular, as a
vehicle for online advertising and commerce. Hence the Net user of
today can be aptly described as a consumer. The Internet is still a
powerful medium for communication, and has in many ways fulfilled the
vision of interactive computing which fuelled J.C.R Licklider's
imagination, but it remains to be seen whether it will be the
democratizing medium of the 21st century, or merely become another
static-filled television channel.

A Note on Citation

Most of the citations contained in this paper was taken from the
Internet. Material skimmed from the Internet will be typeset
according to the configurations of the individual user's computer,
and thus cannot be precisely referenced especially as far as page
numbers are concerned. In order to locate the citations contained
herein one should download the cited texts from the Internet and
format them in Courier 9.